Comment by dccoolgai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dccoolgai | Hacker News Reader

In all the years of gaming and "internet"-ing since then, there is something intangible about the experience BBS systems and these types of games provided that hasn't been achieved since. I know some of it must be simply rosy-goggled nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that there is something material that made the BBS experience awesome that didn't quite translate over to the "internet" as we know it today. I remember that BSSs used to have "picnics" and stuff where everyone met up in real life (I couldn't go because I was too young, but I still appreciated the sense of community that grew around those.)

There was a sort of "liminal" phase of the internet that I've never seen anyone even mention in these types of articles, as well: the "Freenet" era ( http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/history.html ). It was sort of halfway between local BBS and WWW. I wonder if the emergence of the Physical Web or the like might bring about a resurgence of some of this "local"-ness the web lost as it outgrew its origins.

I think I agree that it's the localness of the BBSes that made them so special for me. When I was in middle school, the BBSes were my social group. The games were a fun way to waste some time, uploading games for credits in bytes you could download, but the conversations were the best part. I went to BBS parties and hung out with the people-behind-the-handles in real life. It was always such a shock to see how someone differed from the way you imagined them to look. When I got to college, the BBS scene instantly created a whole new set of friends for me. I don't know how I would have gotten to know people in that strange place without it.

Then the internet came. Suddenly, all by favorite BBS boards were synchronizing their posts with other BBSes across the country. Our little conversations of 5-10 people suddenly exploded into hundreds. It was too much. My posts got lost--or worse, I once got the notice of some sysadmin in another state who didn't like my politics or my language and demanded my local sysadmin deactivate my account. I fled to some other locals-only BBSes, but things were dying. Then Gopher, WWW, and Usenet came along and the BBSes vanished as everyone rushed to build web sites and post comments for all the world to see.

I telnetted into the cavebbs.homeip.net and it was a nice brief bit of nostalgia. I'm not sure if this is something we can recapture, but I hope it gets a bit of historical footnote somewhere.

In Florida the MajorBBS scene called them GTs. In my opinion, the split-screen chat really brought people together. But chat in general was the community thing, along with a few of the door games. Like my old TW2002 opponent, we're still in touch. My little bro went to a couple of those GTs. In retrospect, if I had kids, I wouldn't want them involved in that, because some of those BBS people were questionably creepy.

In one way, Internet chats haven't caught on to what we had in 1989, which was seeing every keystroke from everyone simultaneously in separate panels. Line by line (IRC style) is less personal by comparison. Watching the keystrokes and edits unfold, it's more compelling, and MajorBBS deserves credit for that unique multiuser experience which required specialized hardware. Multitasking > 2 phone lines was rare because fast PCs could barely multitask 2 modems with DESQView or OS/2. Windows did not have any multitasking capability yet. And only OS/2 had any concept of prioritizing the CPU. So most BBS doors were limited to "turn based" games where you play after somebody else (your turn, like RISK) unless you had MajorBBS which had low-latency fast action battlefields like Flash Attack. What you now call AJAX (single page apps) we could do that in the 80s with ANSI position codes, which you're just starting to see today on Facebook, where you can see content updating without a page refresh. We were severely limited to an 80x23 grid with only 16 foreground colors, but we made it amazing.

Some of that feel will likely come back if(when) the internet begins to splinter, infrastructure begins to fail, and you start seeing hacked together municipal or neighborhood networks.

I went to those picnic bbq parties when I was in elementary school and the older folks were always cool about it. :)

I just had a flashback of my discovery of the band Rush from a bbs party.

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